If there’s a single dining experience you can count on in small-town Canada, it’s found at the local Chinese restaurant. Long before chains like Subway or KFC made their way up the Sunshine Coast to my hometown of Powell River, B.C. (pop. 13,157), the Gourmet Canton provided piping hot wonton soup, sticky sweet and sour pork, and chow mein loaded with crisp water chestnuts for family get-togethers and takeout nights.

These dishes — along with the likes of ubiquitous egg rolls and kung pao chicken — are Canadian culinary cornerstones. Yet, as journalist Ann Hui illustrates so powerfully in Chop Suey Nation (Douglas & McIntyre, 2019), they — and the families who make them — don’t always get the respect they deserve.

When it comes to food, the concept of authenticity is a misnomer. There are numerous examples of high-profile, non-Chinese chefs claiming to be authorities on what’s “authentic” and what’s not. Late last year, American chef Andrew Zimmern purported to be “saving the souls of all the people from having to dine at these horseshit restaurants masquerading as Chinese food” with his Minneapolis restaurant Lucky Cricket. Diners also actively perpetuate the myth of “real” versus “fake,” and assign value accordingly. As a recent study revealed, there’s a negative correlation between Yelp star ratings and reviewers’ use of the word “authenticity.” It seems guests and restaurateurs alike are in misguided pursuit of what they deem to be the genuine article, to the detriment of the very real people behind the food they belittle.

In Chop Suey Nation, Ann Hui intertwines her father’s story with those of the families running small-town Chinese restaurants from coast to coast.Douglas & McIntyre

In Chop Suey Nation, Hui puts a unique spin on the subject as she explores her own perceptions of Chinese-Canadian (or chop suey) cuisine, its historical and cultural significance, and the stories of families carrying on the tradition in small towns from coast to coast. “I definitely had in my mind, or maybe it was ingrained in me, this idea that chop suey Chinese food was lesser than the ‘authentic’ stuff; that it was ‘fake,’ that it was somehow less valid or legitimate than food that actually had its origins in China,” says Hui.

Chop suey — “bits and pieces” — began as an ad-hoc cuisine, which was standardized as it spread across Canada and the U.S. While Zimmern and others have disparaged it, Hui hopes her work will help others to learn to appreciate it as she has. “This tendency to dismiss this food, to denigrate it has become so common,” she adds. Created by early Cantonese immigrants using readily available ingredients — such as cabbage, carrots or celery, but always bean sprouts (“as long as you have water and a bucket, you can grow bean sprouts”) — it tells an inspiring story of hardship, persistence and survival.

“This cuisine was created by the first Chinese men who came to this country. Many of them weren’t even trained cooks. They certainly didn’t have access to ingredients to cook authentic Chinese food. They also wouldn’t have had Chinese customers. They were very much improvising and being as creative as they could given the circumstances,” she says. “This was also food that was born out of struggle. These men were working in kitchens only because they were forbidden and prohibited from working in other professional industries. So they were facing economic barriers, they were facing discrimination, they were facing real racism and these dishes were their answer to that. These dishes were their way of getting past those barriers with ingenuity and perseverance. And I think that it just tells such an amazing story about Canada and who we were and where we come from.”

Growing up in Vancouver, Hui was raised on what she thought of as “real” Chinese food — marinated duck wings, jellyfish salad and fish maw soup — and exposed to an “amazingly diverse” array of regional cuisines at many of the city’s exceptional Chinese restaurants. When she and her family stopped at small-town Chinese restaurants on road trips, Hui says she was struck by their sameness — in name and décor — and confounded by menus filled with dishes she had never heard of, yet billed as Chinese.

Author Ann Hui is The Globe and Mail’s national food reporter.Amanda Palmer

In 2016, Hui had the opportunity to investigate some of the questions that arose from those experiences: “Why is there a Chinese restaurant in every small town?”; and “Who are the families that run them?” She initially embarked on an extraordinary 18-day, nearly 10,000-kilometre cross-country journey for a two-part story on small-town Chinese restaurants.

But when she returned from the trip and discovered that her parents had once run two such establishments themselves, the scope of the project widened. It became an opportunity to tell her ailing father’s story in-depth, intertwined with the experiences of other immigrant restaurateurs from Victoria, B.C. to Fogo Island, Nfld.

“It was a stunning realization. My first instinct was just to feel pretty foolish having gone through this experience of driving across the country, visiting and meeting all of these families, and asking them these questions about their histories and their stories only to realize that the same story had played out literally in my own backyard,” says Hui. “The more I talked to other people around me, a lot of friends who also are the children of relatively recent immigrants, I noticed that this was really something that we had in common. A lot of us don’t know our stories. A lot of us either haven’t thought to ask or have families who, like mine, are reluctant to talk about their histories and their pasts. And I really wanted to question that and hopefully break through that a little bit.”

Through her research and travels, Hui gained not only a greater understanding of her family’s history but a newfound respect for chop suey cuisine. This improvised food was born from “pure entrepreneurialism,” she writes, and thus is “the most Chinese of all.” It has immense cultural and historical importance, and is integral to Canadian cuisine on the whole. It’s also “in a lot of cases, legitimately delicious.”

Ann Hui’s father works in the Legion Cafe kitchen while her mother stands in the background, holding her sister Pansy.Hui family

Although many chop suey classics — including the cuisine’s namesake dish and ever-popular General Tso’s chicken — are imports, largely from San Francisco’s Chinatown, Hui learned that there are uniquely Canadian contributions as well. Ginger beef — created in the mid-1970s by George Wong at The Silver Inn in Calgary — Quebec’s fried macaroni, Thunder Bay specialty “Bon Bon ribs” and Newfoundland chow mein, which uses shredded cabbage instead of crispy noodles, all tell a distinctly Canadian story.

Hui also encountered hyper-local examples; dishes specifically tailored to suit the tastes of a community. In Deer Lake, Nfld., she met Richard Yu, owner of the Canton Restaurant. Yu, whose crunchy, deep-fried and saucy spareribs had been a hit at his restaurant in Vancouver, had adapted his recipe to accommodate the needs of his predominantly elderly guests; braised ribs were much easier to chew.

Since her initial story was published, and even more so following the release of Chop Suey Nation, legions have expressed their loyalty to the Chinese restaurant they grew up with. “There’s a reason why a lot of people love this food. There’s a reason why my husband still loves it and wants to eat it every once in a while,” she adds. “That shouldn’t be ignored; there’s validity in that.

“These are dishes made with local ingredients, made with local palates in mind, made here in Canada that tell this very Canadian story of immigration,” says Hui. “To me, it’s as Canadian of a cuisine as anything else — as maple syrup, as poutine, as the peameal bacon sandwich. This is Canadian food.”